Working at the Leading Edge of Social Media Research
Sophia Choukas-Bradley, Associate Professor in the Dietrich School’s Department of Psychology at the Dietrich school, still remembers the moment from her childhood: She was walking down a school hallway when something shifted. Suddenly, she was acutely aware of how she looked. It was as if a switch had flipped; no longer simply moving through the world, she was concerned about how she appeared to others.
"Most adolescent girls and adult women remember what it felt like to run on the playground or down a soccer field without having thoughts popping into one's brain about: ‘How do I look? How do I look? How do I look?’" explains Choukas-Bradley. "Some of us remember a specific moment. For me, it happened as I was walking down the school hallway when I was 11. Other people remember it as a more gradual transition, but most adolescent girls and young women worry about how others are perceiving them all the time. That has always fascinated me."
That fascination became the foundation for a groundbreaking career in psychology research. Today, Choukas-Bradley is a leading voice among those trying to understand how social media and online interactions shape adolescent girls' body image and mental health. While the unique nature of online interactions is taken as self-evident today, when she started her research a decade ago, Choukas-Bradley had to push against resistance from others within her field.
"At the beginning of this research, there was so much pushback from the field of psychology, from peer relations researchers and body image researchers saying we didn't need new tools, that we could use the ones we'd always used," she recalls. "But when it comes to peer relationships and body image, we are talking about experiences that are fundamentally transformed by the presence of social media. The experience of being bombarded 24/7 with idealized images of oneself and others that have been digitally altered—this is a whole new set of experiences that we can't just use our old measures to understand."
Through extensive focus groups with young people and rigorous quantitative validation studies, Choukas-Bradley and her colleagues developed the Appearance-Related Social Media Consciousness (ASMC) scale, a framework for measuring how people perceive their online appearance and feel preoccupied with it. Researchers across the field now use the scale to study the impacts of social media.
"We found that ASMC predicts changes over time in adolescents' body image concerns and depressive symptoms," says Choukas-Bradley. This impactful work led to a 2024 National Science Foundation CAREER grant.
Choukas-Bradley's research program is notable for its pioneering and diverse research methods. Her group uses longitudinal surveys to follow young people over months and years, tracking how specific social media experiences predict changes in mental health. She conducts in-depth qualitative interviews and collaborates with colleagues using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to understand how adolescents' brains respond to different social media experiences. Most recently, Choukas-Bradley has incorporated an approach called ecological momentary assessment (EMA), which allows researchers to ping adolescents directly on their phones multiple times a day.
"When kids report back on the last six months of their lives, we miss so much nuance," Choukas-Bradley explains. "EMA allows us to say: Given your baseline level of anxiety, or your baseline level of body image concerns, what happens on a day when you have more social media stress than usual?"
With her collaborators, Choukas-Bradley combines these measures with eye-tracking and social media data collected from adolescents’ phones to gain a holistic understanding of how they consume social media content and how that content affects them. Machine learning tools allow them to asses these large datasets to look for patterns. Ultimately, Choukas-Bradley’s research aims to identify the types of content and experiences that are most problematic to inform policy and promote better algorithm development.
"Algorithms are currently programmed to make as much profit as possible, which ends up prioritizing extreme content, and most extreme content is harmful for kids," she explains. "People have done demonstrations where they create a new social media account saying someone is an adolescent girl, and very quickly, the algorithm is showing content that promotes eating disorders. That's something that could be changed at the algorithmic level."
Choukas-Bradley's path to psychology wasn't entirely straightforward. "I wanted to be a writer," she says. Asked to interview people and write about their responses for a college writing course, Choukas-Bradley discovered her interest in psychology by accidentally setting up a quantitative study.
"The feedback from the professor was: ‘This seems more like a psychology study than a nonfiction writing piece,’” Choukas-Bradley recalls, which triggered her pivot toward psychology. Choukas-Bradley’s writing journey has come full-circle with the upcoming publication of her book Beyond the Looking Glass. The book, based on learnings from Choukas-Bradley’s research career, is designed to help parents, educators, and young people navigate the complex digital landscape.
"Social media is here to stay. It will probably get more complicated, not less complicated, and it's not realistic for most families to say a kid is just not allowed to use social media," observes Choukas-Bradley. "What we need to be doing is encouraging different types of social media use and having open dialogues with kids where we acknowledge that all of us are struggling with this."
Choukas-Bradley's connection to Pittsburgh began in 2015, when she completed her clinical psychology internship at Western Psychiatric Hospital.
"I fell in love with this city," she says.
In 2017, she was elated to join the Department of Psychology, but when her wife accepted a position in Baltimore, Choukas-Bradley spent two years away from the city and looking for a way back. In 2022, when her wife secured a tenure-track position at Carnegie Mellon University, Choukas-Bradley said she was fortunate to be able to bring her research program back to Pitt.
Says Choukas-Bradley, "I knew I loved Pitt before I left, but spending two years away led me to understand just how special Pitt, Pittsburgh, and the Department of Psychology specifically are. It's really an incredible place. The number of people studying adolescent mental health across psychology and psychiatry and also pediatrics, public health, social work, in the School of Education—I do not think there is another university in the United States where there's a higher density of scholars conducting cutting-edge research on adolescent mental health."
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